Solving Resource Allocation/Scheduling Problems with Constraint Integer Programming

Constraint Integer Programming (CIP) is a generalization of mixed-integer programming (MIP) in the direction of constraint programming (CP) allowing the inference techniques that have traditionally been the core of CP to be integrated with the problem solving techniques that form the core of complete MIP solvers. In this paper, we investigate the application of CIP to scheduling problems that require resource and start-time assignments to satisfy resource capacities. The best current approach to such problems is logic-based Benders decomposition, a manual decomposition method. We present a CIP model and demonstrate that it achieves performance competitive to the decomposition while outperforming the standard MIP and CP formulations.